Short essays by Douglas Winslow Cooper, Ph.D., the author of TING AND I: A Memoir of Love, Courage and Devotion, published in September 2011 by Outskirts Press (Parker, CO, USA), available from outskirtspress.com/tingandi, Barnes and Noble [bn.com], and Amazon [amazon.com], in paperback or ebook formats. Please visit us at tingandi.com for more information.

Thursday, September 1, 2016

Review of BORN CREATIVE

Recently,
I reviewed an excellent book by Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire, Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of
the Creative Mind, which summarized ten habits research has revealed are
typical of the creative mind, habits we can cultivate in ourselves to improve
our own creativity: Imaginative Play, Passion, Daydreaming, Solitude,
Intuition, Openness to Experience, Mindfulness, Sensitivity, Turning Adversity
into Advantage, Thinking Differently.

Harry
W. Hoover’s Born Creative maintains
that we all are born creative, but some of us don’t believe we are, and so we
aren’t. He cites a Harvard Business
Review (HBR) study that found
that those who think they are not creative, are not, and those who think they
are creative, are. A skeptic could conclude the respondents simply correctly
summarized their past experience, but Hoover would side with investor Henry
Ford, credited with, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re
right.” Ford’s implied urging toward positive thinking shares the same possible
fallacy, but never mind: regardless of the degree to which we are innately
creative, we can all do better, and Hoover’s little book aims to help us.

Hoover
offers HBR’s five-question test to gauge our “creative mindset.” It asks yes/no
questions about associational thinking, questioning, observing, idea networking,
and experimenting. If you score, “not creative” don’t despair: you can change. Harry
Hoover will help you. After all, some study found that the average adult thinks
up two or three alternatives for “any given situation,” the average child
thinks of 60. No wonder kids find so many ways to get into trouble!

Born Creative
differs from Wired to Create in
assuming that we are all pretty much creative, rather than just some of us, and
that we can all learn to do better.

There’s
a chapter here on how to beat self-doubt. Hoover was influenced by Michael Gelb’s
How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci,
and material in that book and a comment by David Norris helped him realize that
his time was more precious than his income, especially when he was spending a
couple of hours a day commuting. He altered his career trajectory and now works
from home. It took courage to make the change.

Chapter
3, “The ‘I Am' List,” has a clever exercise: Leaving the first entry blank,
write down 30 things you are good at. When all done, put as #1 “I am really
creative.” Read it morning and bedtime for 10 days. You’ll feel more creative. It
is auto-suggestion, success by association.

Chapter
4, “A Fish Tale,” tells of a shark that died of starvation once mistakenly
convinced it could no longer catch the live minnows fed it. If we think we
cannot, we cannot.

Chapter
5, “How to Brainstorm,” emphasizes the need to keep pushing for more ideas, while
shielding each participant from criticism. Crucial elements described are:
proper preparation, skilled facilitator, generating without denigrating,
suspending judgment, quantity not quality to start, going beyond reason, and
piggybacking one idea on another. Capture the ideas in writing.

Chapter
6, “Creativity Exercises,” includes visual artistry suggestions that are far
from my literary/numerical bent, and then goes into Mind-mapping, a useful
method of depicting ideas so as to generate new connections.

Chapter
7, “SCAMMPERR for Creativity,” uses that nine-letter acronym to suggest the following
approaches: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Magnify, Modify, Put to another use,
Eliminate, Rearrange, Reverse. Hoover explains each of these with examples.

Chapter
8, “A More Creative You,” starts by citing Nobelist chemist Linus Pauling to
the effect that the best way to generate a good idea is to generate a lot of
ideas.

Born Creative ends
with some valuable resource citations, books and internet sites.

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About Me

Douglas Winslow Cooper, Ph.D., is a freelance writer and retired environmental physicist, author of "Ting and I: A Memoir of Love, Courage and Devotion," published in September 2011 by Outskirts Press (Parker, CO), available on amazon.com. Co-author of "The Shield of Gold" and "Kidnapped Twice," editor of "High Shoes and Bloomers" and of "But...at What Cost," also available through Outskirts Press and Amazon. His email address is douglas@tingandi.com. See also his http://writeyourbookwithme.com and http://managenursingcareathome.com.